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'Tis respectability doth make cowards of us all

They aren't hated like BNP is. They are respectable, so they will chicken out in the end to do anything.

Well, I think of myself as a cynic, but that one made even me blink. Yet one can see the point. And that point leads to the following depressing conjecture:

Every political party that at time t is conservative and not loony will eventually either cease to be conservative or become loony at some time t+.

One cause of this dynamic is the fact that plain, ordinary, traditional conservative views are as much hated by the left and treated as being as much beyond the pale as really crazy views. In the present (new) stage of the culture war, the shrillness is reaching a point of diminishing returns, and it is hard to tell how much more shrill the left could be about, say, a person who believes that homosexual acts are immoral if instead he were a Holocaust denier. It's the grade inflation of leftist outrage.

A perhaps unexpected effect of this is that, to hold on to one's conservative moral views, one has to be prepared to be thoroughly hated and demonized. But once you get inured to being thoroughly hated and demonized, you sometimes find yourself in the same group with people with other views for which they are hated and demonized, who have latched onto your party. I've called this elsewhere (though I don't have time to find the link, and it was in a combox) "ideological static cling." Hence, unfortunately, the ranks of R.P. supporters (please do not mention his full name in the comments thread for fear of Google-led trolls) contained a disproportionate number of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists also courted the Constitution Party candidate and were, at least, not completely rebuffed. Similarly, the super-traditional followers of Lefebvre among Roman Catholics ended up, embarrassingly, containing at least one Holocaust-denying bishop.

If, on the other hand, a party purges these loony elements, there is the very real sociological danger that the party will become worried about respectability in and of itself, which will inevitably lead, under pressure from the left, to their losing their original conservative credentials.

What do my readers think about this dynamic? And can anything be done about it?

Comments (50)

I really think you hit the nail on the head. Another way to put it: the road to heaven is narrow, but the road to hell is wide. Its just tough to keep your own soul on the straight and narrow for long, much less an entire group of people...

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

A perhaps unexpected effect of this is that, to hold on to one's conservative moral views

Fr. Luigi Guisanni was asked right before he died, did mankind abandon the Church, or did the Church abandon mankind? He replied; the Church abandoned mankind and it did so the day we became too embarrassed to talk about Jesus Christ and replaced Him with "values" instead.

Another way to put it: the road to heaven is narrow, but the road to hell is wide. Its just tough to keep your own soul on the straight and narrow for long, much less an entire group of people

One consequence of seculairization is that as faith declines, politics and ideology become central to one's personal identity. Mistaking parties and programs as vehicles for salvation is now the favored shortcut to Hell of both the Left and Right.

I think it has to do with conservatives talking and thinking liberally. I mean, everyone these days talks about human rights, and when's the last time you heard a prominent conservative talk about the natural aristocracy? Conservatism these days is more instinctual than intellectual in most of its adherents. We know these liberals are wrong, but we can't really figure out why, and since we talk and think like them they start to sound pretty good after a while.

We also have, in this country at least, a ridiculous left-right dichotomy that everything is forced into, with the left side being libertarian and the right side being authoritarian. No one wants to be an authoritarian, so there you have it.

Great conjecture. The Republicans and UK Conservatives definitely support the conjecture, since neither is conservative today. Sarkozy turned out to be not conservative. Berlusconi is the closest thing to conservative of a major country in Europe and he is loony all in himself. Evidently, Italy couldn't live without him.

Stalin "History is full of abnormal people." We live under their influence for good or ill. The search Stalin "history is full" gets an interesting set of Stalin quotes.

Conservatives get comfortable. They get comfortable with the people who are part of the permanent machinery of politics. Those people are not conservative and they are not on the side of the common people.

Adam Smith was a conspiracy theorist. The antitrust laws are based on conspiracy theory. Industrial Organization is a branch of economics that is the basis of antitrust economics. It is in effect, the mathematics of market conspiracy.

The Antitrust Division always has an econ prof as DAAG who is part of the same small group of schools. Very interestingly, the buildings and professorships of the econ departments in these schools are all endowed by Wall Street M and A tycoons.

These DAAG's also work for a small number of expert witness firms and every major antitrust case hires these profs to testify on both sides. When DOJ does an antitrust case, it doesn't have its econ Ph.D.'s testify, it has one of these profs, usually one who has been a DAAG or one who becomes one a few years later.

There are many complaints that the antitrust division doesn't really enforce the antitrust laws.

The same profs are hired as DAAGs whichever party is in power. DOJ doesn't publish a list of them you have to put it together yourself.

Respectability and sanity are veneers. Humans are barely sane and barely respectable at best. The way to seem sane and respectable is to repeat what is the line of your day. This is another asymptotic as our colleague Hesperado would say. The more you say what you think, the more you approach a singularity of insanity and non respectability. But your chance of being closer to the truth on what is going very wrong is higher.

A real problem for conservatives is that they feel they must meet the bounds of respectable opinion, but never think how to set the boundaries themselves.

There's a special kind of conservative who enjoys purging those to his right.

Considering conservatives' relative powerlessness, there is rational ground for some to serve this purpose in hopes they may advance their other causes. However, there is no rational ground to expect this to lead to long-term success.

I'll have to remember "ideological static cling." In some ways it's a severe danger. If we must treat Peter Singer as a respectable debating partner, why shouldn't we treat flagrant racists or John Birchers as such?

The same arguments that Democratic-leaning pro-lifers use to defend their support for Obama can be used for rightists to defend alliances with even more unsavory elements.

But if they mount such defenses, right-wingers won't get a reputation for pragmatism and magnanimity.

Come to think of it, both the Useful Purger and the Pragmatic Naif make the mistakes of thinking the "Leftist" values of anti-racism or magnanimity can be appropriated for their own causes without problem or compromise.

"In the present (new) stage of the culture war, the shrillness is reaching a point of diminishing returns, and it is hard to tell how much more shrill the left could be about, say, a person who believes that homosexual acts are immoral if instead he were a Holocaust denier. It's the grade inflation of leftist outrage."

It seems to me that conservatives have not remotely taken this lesson to heart. If you're going to be treated as if you were Adolph Hitler no matter how mild your views are, and no matter how you try to suck up and gain "respectability", then why not fight boldly for what you really believe in? The incremental cost in terms of hatred that you will incur is zero. The leftists have already painted you in the worse possible terms. They have already shot their wad. They have already cried wolf.

GOP politicians are far too stupid and gutless to see this. Standing up for their alleged beliefs will cost them nothing with respect to their enemies, but would have a huge incremental benefit with respect to supporters, who have been waiting and waiting and waiting in vain to see these castrati actually stand up for anything.

But once you get inured to being thoroughly hated and demonized, you sometimes find yourself in the same group with people with other views for which they are hated and demonized, who have latched onto your party.

This is true.

But more frustrating still is that sometimes the morally upright and courageous person who who puts up with being hated and the nutcase with all his kook conspiracy theories who latches on to the former's position are one and the same person.

A real problem for conservatives is that they feel they must meet the bounds of respectable opinion, but never think how to set the boundaries themselves.

I think Kevin Jones has a good point here. There's nothing wrong in principle with deciding that X is beyond the pale and that we don't want people who believe X in our club. But _we_ should decide what X is, not look, not even sidelong and quietly, to our left and let _them_ decide what X is.

The truthful answer; it is just another political religion for people wandering through the various tents of the modern circus.

It provides symbols, liturgies and high priests offering crude but satisfying answers to the complexity of life while providing a social identity for true believers. The banners can be contradictory and fleeting; Empire - Small Government, Unlimited Growth - Personal Responsibility, Capitalism - Faith Based Initiatives, but one thing it doesn't do much of is conserve.

Feminism was created by male rakes. Conservatism is a conspiracy forged by Liberals.

You might be right that a lot of people who supported Ron Paul for President also endorse 9/ll conspiracy theories. They think that the U.S. government caused 9/11. From what I can gather, others like Ron Paul because they think Ron Paul supports the constitution.

Another thing "R.P." might stand for is Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, another Libertarian. Perhaps Rand Paul will take the mantle from Ron Paul and run for President in 2012. Before that, though, we might see Rand Paul as the U.S. Senator for Kentucky in 2010.

Conservatism--as a philosophical, cultural, and political project--does in fact have boundaries, and those have been set by the cluster of ideas offered by such giants as Burke, Lincoln, Chesterton, Lewis, Hayek, Chambers, Friedman, Kirk, Weaver, Gilder, Buckley, and Reagan. There are, of course, disagreements among these thinkers and their followers, but there is an identifiable stream of thought. It informs our understanding of human nature, families, civil society, just government, and markets.

What contemporary conservatism has lost--especially in its Hannitized and Coulterized manifestations of superficial ranting--is the connection to a paternity that is necessary so that its intellectual DNA may be passed on to its progeny. The Hannitys, the Counters, and to a lesser extent the Ingrahams, of the conservative world are intellectual mules without deep knowledge of their own patrimony. They speak of their beliefs as if they were mere beliefs whose instantiation in the culture and government can only be the result of the willful exercise of power inspired by mobs organized by them via Talk Radio and Fox TV. I have no doubt that these political celebs sincerely believe their beliefs are true. But that's not the problem. The problem is that they do not seem to have any inclination to present arguments for these beliefs in a way that is carefully crafted, cheerfully presented, and persuasively offered. Unlike the giants from whom they received their intellectual inheritance, they think only of today and tomorrow, but not of a decade or even three decades from now. Their point seems always to embarrass their liberal guest or opponent or to come up with a clever, sit-com like, one-liner to keep their audiences amused. They don't seem to want to plant the seeds of intellectual curiosity to inspire others. They confuse moving people with a movement of people. They want a choir without a cathedral.

On the positive side (for conservatives), the Left's tactics reveal a lack of rigor on their part as well. They no longer feel confident in making an argument for their point of view with respect to those with whom they disagree. They feel the pressure, like many conservatives do, to bypass the mind and go directly to the gut. This is why, for example, they no longer believe they have to argue that the late-term fetuses whose skulls Dr. Tiller crushed were not members of the human community worthy of dignity and respect. Rather, they will focus on the injustice of Dr. Tiller's murder and hold all prolifers by proxy responsible for it, and by this tactic drown out the compelling case for the unborn's membership in the moral community.

In my judgment, the party that plays for keeps and not for next week will eventually triumph. That means that you have to be a happy warrior, willing to make your case and to take your lumps with magnanimity and grace. It also means that you fight intelligently, and fiercly, for your point of view while resisting the temptation to attack others personally. (And yes, I have fallen short in that regard on many occasions). You can't be a Keith Olbermann or an Ann Coulter and achieve lasting dominance in American politics. You may make a lot of money, become famous, and/or sell loads of books. Bill Buckley, by the way, achieved those very things without costing him his soul. Better to be a Buckley dissatisfied than a Hannity satisfied.

As for the present discussion, the best you can do is to point out the inanity of these ridiculous guilt by association fallacies, and to conduct yourself in a way that demonstrates the falsity of these crazy chargers to the fair-minded lurkers. You can't convince the fanatic or the propagandist. The first won't be convinced, while for the latter convincing is not even an issue. So, you have to forget about these jokers and clowns, and make your case to those who have ears to hear.

"This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader."

That this is the function of English Conservatism was laid out in some detail, in words quite similar to these, by Anthony Trollope in his novel "The Prime Minister," written in the late 19th century. It's only news because people keep ignoring it.

Neither Hayak or Friedman were conservatives. Both explicitedly denied it. One of the problems is that economic neoliberalism/freemarkets has been defined as conservative while historically that has not been the case. Heck, even Michael Novak in his The Spirit of Capitalism recognizes the fundamental radical and tradition-busting power of liberal democratic values.

Mind you, I think that a lot of what Hayek and Friedman wrote about economics is correct, but I am a little concerned about the affects that their economics has on the intellectual and social culture of the societies that adopt them.

Frank, your advice is good advice, but I'm not entirely sure that it addresses exactly the worry I'm raising. For example, who could ever have predicted (I certainly couldn't) that 9/11 Truthers would court the best-known third party on the right in the U.S.? That came totally out of the blue. And there isn't _exactly_ anything in Lincoln, Chesterton, or Buckley on the question of 9/11 conspiracy theories. :-) In a sense, these ideological outcasts glommed on to both the R.P. campaign and the Constitution Party (whose major candidate is a good friend of R.P. and was endorsed by him) because they saw it as an opportunity. One can understand the thinking. After all, many on the right correctly do believe that the PC forces are trying to brainwash us about a lot of things, including empirical things like overpopulation or global warming. Conspiracy theories tend to be opportunistic, and once you can no longer trust the gate-keepers of information, if you don't have enough confidence in your own ability to see what's true and what's not, you become a mark for conspiracy theories without basis.

Many on the so-called "extreme" right are, in my opinion, rightly concerned both about unrestricted immigration and also about various globalization moves within the Americas (for example, the passes for Mexican trucks to cross borders without due searching). And from that to various one-hemisphere-government fears is not all _that_ big of a step, even if some of us view it as (as of now) a step into lunacy.

Or consider the fact that during the past thirty years the pro-life movement has drawn from the south. Some of my closest pro-life friends in graduate school were pro-south and pro-agrarian and thought (to put it mildly) that the Lincoln admiration in mainstream American conservatism is excessive. Making common cause with them for the pro-life movement is _obviously the right thing to do_, but then one runs into problems when one discovers that a particular person doesn't actually believe southern slavery was wrong at all!

And then there are the people who are considered "conservative" but are shaky in other directions. Buckley himself was extremely shaky in his latter years on the question of dehydrating to death cognitively disabled individuals. It just happens that being shaky on that question is considered more respectable in our country than being sympathetic to slavery!

The point I'm making here is that there will always be choices to make by the editors of a journal (or blog) or the leaders of any group or party. And there is this unfortunate social dynamic that goes on whereby if you don't care about respectability at all, you end up with kooks in your ranks and even in your leadership, often kooks in areas you could never possibly have predicted and that your arguments quite understandably never provided for (like 9/11 conspiracy theory). If, on the other hand, you are concerned about respectability, then you have the danger that your party or journal or whatever will lose its soul in ways more acceptable to the left.

I guess I should add too that I don't see Hannity and Coulter moving us to either compromise (e.g. on pro-life issues) or to believe loony things. To me, the whole question of the high or low quality of conservative discourse is to some degree orthogonal to my worry here. And in some ways the supposedly "low-quality argument" talk radio types are less likely to lead us astray in a compromising direction than the more high-brow types who write long arguments and want to be thought of as intellectual. Consider that Doug Kmiec used to write for First Things!!! Fairly frequently, if I recall correctly.

If put the question: "How do you define 'Conservatism'?"; it seems the likely reply would almost undoubtedly be: "However else I define it as such!"

hilarious.

The point Dr McGrew is making in the OP is kind of ironic given how neo-con-ish WWWtW is. What is the role of National Review and the movement which clusters around it if it is not to follow meekly six inches behind the Progressive parade, picking up litter and politely asking that the band play a little slower? Younger Buckley apologized, either himself or by proxy, for Franco, for Pinochet, for McCarthy, for explicit ethnic bias in immigration policy, and for racial discrimination. These were not side issues. When these apologetics lost their last vestige of respectability, they were dumped down the memory hole or retrospectively condemned.

If conservative means something like the dictionary definition of resisting change, then a perfectly conservative party will essentially always exhibit a time consistency problem. As long as the conservative party is not perfectly successful the conservative party of tomorrow will be defending tomorrow's status quo, which is not today's status quo, so it will look leftist by today's standards (if society is moving left) or reactionary by today's standards (if society is moving right). The only thing you are saying when you say that conservatives or their party is drifting left is that society is drifting left.

To make the tautology go away, you need a fixed definition of conservative. But what would that be? Dr Beckwith's pitch perfect neo-con fusionist comment above illustrates the problem with trying to come up with one. Sean Hannity talks about conservative principles all the time because there aren't any beyond parade-following.

Is there any doubt that tomorrow's conservatives will view, say, employment & housing discrimination against homosexuals as illicit? What percentage today view such discrimination against blacks as illicit?

It seems to me that most in the WWWtW community view torture apologetics and discrimination apologetics as putting one beyond the pale. See the recent posts by Drs Beckwith and McGrew on these two subjects. But torture was universal law enforcement procedure, memorialized in such places as the Dragnet television show, for all human history up to the 1960s, and for all time since then except in the developed world. The same with discrimination. Now, each post got some push back, but not much, really.

I think the dynamic Dr McGrew points to arises from the fact that there really is nothing more than parade-following to contemporary conservatism. The left has a particular idea of where they want to go and a high degree if internal agreement about goals and tactics. "Conservative" is just a catch-all phrase for all the people who don't agree with the left. The movement seemed to have coherence during the Cold War because all the factions agreed that stopping the commies was really important.

Bill, many people would _not_ view me as mainstream, much less "neo-con," given my recent post on Muslim immigration--a post for which I received more flak of more kinds and more unpleasantness even than was reported or noted here on W4. Others would certainly not view me as "neo-con" given my stated admiration for Lawrence Auster and my habit of citing him and linking to him. I have had one good cyber-friend even tell me that he had a struggle to decide whether to link to my personal blog (which in the end he did decide to do), because I have a link to View from the Right on the page and cite Auster with some frequency. It is true that I am more "neo-con" on issues of economics and foreign policy than my blog colleague here, Jeff Martin, but you can see his archives for absolute blasts against the "neo-cons" if you think W4 just is "neo-con." Finally, both I and my W4 colleagues are very much "social cons" on the issues of abortion, euthanasia, homosexual activism, and the like, and I see no sign of shifting.

To my mind it is unfair to lump all conservatives together with a sort of sneering dismissive anathema such as I sense in your comment. "Ah, those mainstream conservatives! Wanna bet they'll all be arguing for homosexual rights in ten years?" Well, yes, I'll bet. I'll bet on myself. If I'm alive in ten years, or twenty, or forty, I will not have compromised on that issue or any of the other ones I've listed.

I do not view the torture issue as some sort of "compromise with liberalism." If you knew Zippy Catholic and his writings well, you would know that he is absolutely original, that he never follows the crowd, and that his stance on torture was absolutely all his own and had nothing to do with being led by the nose by the liberal establishment! Far from it, in fact. If anything, the "neocons" tend to be _pro_-torture, so your categories are a little confused if you are equating "being anti-torture" with "being a compromiser with the left" with "being a neocon."

I wrote the original post from exactly the perspective of a person who has strong sympathies for third parties precisely because I resent and will not cooperate with the drift-to-the-left phenomenon. But what I have unfortunately noticed is that these small parties, precisely because they are viewed as socially "fringey," seem to attract people who are at the fringes in a variety of totally bizarre and in some cases unpredictable ways. Then--as in the videotape of the strange encounter between the truthers and the Constitution Party candidate--they are taken by surprise and don't come back quickly enough with, "Get out of here. I want nothing to do with you. No, I don't think there are 'interesting questions' there. I don't need your support."

Blackadder, you have a good point. Of course, there is a double standard: If there are (and this is actually a good example) 9/11 truthers among the far left--which there are--this is not held against the left. But if there are such people among the far right, this will be held against the far right. Moreover, when you're in the middle of forging a coalition or an alliance or whatever, and you know you have unusual views (in my case, on the right), it isn't very comforting to know that whackadoos abound on the left as well. One already knows that, but one wants to know how to avoid attracting the whackadoos on the right while at the same time remaining true even to unusual principles of one's own.

Lydia: "One cause of this dynamic is the fact that plain, ordinary, traditional conservative ..."

... persons allow themselves to enslaved and hobbled by the pseudo-morality of "niceness" and "civility."

... persons allow themselves to be seduced by the siren-call of "the moral high-ground" implicit in making "niceness" or "civility" the highest moral virtue.

And, as a consequence, "plain, ordinary, traditional conservative" persons frequently find themselves conspiring with those who desire and work for their destruction in the "moral" effort to marginalize and silence the "rude" and "uncivil" persons who insist upon speaking truth.

"The point Dr McGrew is making in the OP is kind of ironic given how neo-con-ish WWWtW is."

I have no idea what this means. I am your regular run-of-the mill, con. I am not a paleo-con, since I take the side of Lincoln in the Civil War and America in the Second World War. I am not a neo-con, since I have no idea what that means.

Francis Beckwith: "... The Hannitys, the Counters, and to a lesser extent the Ingrahams, of the conservative world are intellectual mules without deep knowledge of their own patrimony. ..."

Please! Clear your mind of the pernicious effects of "liberalism."

While is it true that Hannity is shallow, Coulter is not (I have not enough experience of Ingraham to make a judgment).

In truth, your complaint with Coulter is that she isn't "nice," that she "offends" the "liberals" ... and therefore, since you are valuing "niceness" over truth, you will quickly descend into un-niceness toward her in your ever-fruitless quest to be "respectable" (as that is defined by the "liberals").

Lydia McGrew: "Or consider the fact that during the past thirty years the pro-life movement has drawn from the south. Some of my closest pro-life friends in graduate school were pro-south and pro-agrarian and thought (to put it mildly) that the Lincoln admiration in mainstream American conservatism is excessive. Making common cause with them for the pro-life movement is _obviously the right thing to do_, but then one runs into problems when one discovers that a particular person doesn't actually believe southern slavery was wrong at all!"

Is it *really* the case that such persons "actually believe southern slavery was [not] wrong at all?"

Might it not be the case, rather, that such persons simply believe that Lincoln was wrong (morally and Constitutionally) in what he did?

My father was a Southerner; I am a Yankee born and bred (though, as it turns out, even half my mother's family were ultimately Southern). As I was "educated" in public schools, I had the "proper" worshipful attitude about Lincoln ... sort of like I suppose Catholics do toward that or that saint. For instance, when as I child I saw the Star Trek episode in which Kirk met the pseudo-resurrected Lincoln, I was very emotionally moved, to the point of tears at the corners of my eyes.

Disagreement about Lincoln and the Civil War (or, as he insisted, the "War Between the States") was one of the major conflicts I had with my father. But, as I age, I find myself moving closer to his position.

My father's grandfather, a white-Indian "half-breed," held slaves before the Civil War. He freed them two years before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which is to say, at about the time the war started. My father always insisted that the man freed them because he had become a Christian. But, perhaps he freed them simply because most of "our people" were Unionists -- for all the good that did them in the end.

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man,
His enemies say he's on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him.
He was supposed to feel bad.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him,
'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
He's the neighborhood bully.

He got no allies to really speak of.
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love.
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Every empire that's enslaved him is gone,
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
In bed with nobody, under no one's command.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on.
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health.
He's the neighborhood bully.

What's anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin', they say.
He just likes to cause war.
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed,
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed.
He's the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers?
Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill,
Running out the clock, time standing still,
Neighborhood bully.

Is it *really* the case that such persons "actually believe southern slavery was [not] wrong at all?"

I have known and could name specific people, good friends of mine, who yes, explicitly, did not and presumably still do not believe that slavery was wrong. They would of course have preferred that the nicer slave owners were more numerous but did not believe that chattel slavery is wrong in itself so long as the slaves are well-treated. I could name another close friend from the same years who used to believe this but changed his mind when he became Roman Catholic. He told me, in all frankness, that he would be "an Aristotelian on slavery" were it not contrary to the position of the Catholic Church.

If there are (and this is actually a good example) 9/11 truthers among the far left--which there are--this is not held against the left. But if there are such people among the far right, this will be held against the far right.

The left isn't held responsible for 9/11 truthers, but it is held responsible for loopy hollywood activists, environmentalist wackos, women who insist on spelling women 'womyn' etc. It may not feel the same to you since you're on the receiving end of it in one case but not the other, but overall I think it at least balances out.

Moreover, when you're in the middle of forging a coalition or an alliance or whatever, and you know you have unusual views (in my case, on the right), it isn't very comforting to know that whackadoos abound on the left as well. One already knows that, but one wants to know how to avoid attracting the whackadoos on the right while at the same time remaining true even to unusual principles of one's own.

I'm afraid comforting isn't my strong suit. The best I can do here is to say that if your views ever do become more popular, the whackadoos will stop being attracted to it.

it is held responsible for loopy hollywood activists, environmentalist wackos, women who insist on spelling women 'womyn' etc. It may not feel the same to you since you're on the receiving end of it in one case but not the other, but overall I think it at least balances out.

The reason it doesn't feel the same to me is because I don't think such "holding responsible" is nearly as widely publicized nor as hammered home in the MSM. C'mon: I saw quite a number of MSM stories about the Holocaust-denying bishop, and they were harping over and over on the Pope's visit about how he "didn't say enough" about this or that in the church's past. But to see anyone "holding the left responsible" for loopy hollywood activists, environmentalist wackos, etc., you pretty much nowadays have to go to the conservative blogosphere or news sources or talk radio thought of as "conservative." Wesley J. Smith, for example, has repeatedly complained about the low level of national publicity for some really scary ELF terrorist threats and even actions (setting houses on fire, for example) and so forth out there. We all know that if these threats and actions were coming from pro-life groups, they'd be splattered all over Yahoo news and NBC for days on end.

So, no, in terms of what Joe Average sees and hears when he turns on his TV or boots up his computer, I don't think it "balances out."

Conservatism--as a philosophical, cultural, and political project--does in fact have boundaries, and those have been set by the cluster of ideas offered by such giants as Burke, Lincoln, Chesterton, Lewis, Hayek, Chambers, Friedman, Kirk, Weaver, Gilder, Buckley, and Reagan.

At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a force of seventy thousand persons labored at an undertaking whose nature they knew little or nothing about; in fact, wartime propaganda had been so effective that they took pride in their ignorance and boasted of it as a badge of honor or as a sign of co-operation-----in what? It is just possible that a few, and I should be willing to say a very few, had they known that their efforts were being directed to the slaughter of noncombatants on a scale never before contemplated, or to a perfection of brutality as we have defined the term, might have refused complicity. Perhaps they would have had some concept of war as an institution which forbids aimless killing; perhaps they would have had a secret feeling that the world is morally designed and that offenses of this kind, under whatever auspices committed, bring retribution; in any case, it is just possible that a few of these anonymous toilers would have given a thought to the larger responsibility. It was rumored that among the world's elite concerned with atomic research that there were a few who declined to participate in an operation so contrary to the canons of civilization. . . . Imagine the modern state considering a referendum to conscience! The bomb was an unparalleled means; was this not enough? Just so does modern industrial and political organization, which is irrational hierarchy, make the citizen an ethical eunuch.

So, no, in terms of what Joe Average sees and hears when he turns on his TV or boots up his computer, I don't think it "balances out."

It doesn't even remotely balance out. As 'Mencius Moldbug' wrote, apropos of James von Brunn:

You might have noticed that James von Brunn didn't commit his crime at the Commucaust Museum. This is not next door to the Holocaust Museum. Nor is it ten times the size. It does not even exist, and nor is there even any such catchy term. And what if it did? Would Kendall Myers show up at its door, and shoot some poor redneck guard?

The crimes of the right are crimes, so important that we must be constantly reminded of them. The crimes of the left, or the crimes of the enemies of the right, go in the memory hole. Sudden Jihad Syndrome? Never heard of it. Che Guevara? He's that guy on a T-shirt. Bill Ayers? Just a guy in my neighborhood.

In my judgment, the party that plays for keeps and not for next week will eventually triumph.

Yes, Dr. Beckwith. That party is the party of the left. They've been winning, mostly uninterrupted, for three centuries. They don't care about respectability, propriety, or law, though they've been so successful that they can largely determine the terms of all three. The role and character of the captive opposition is perfectly well described by the R.L. Dabney passage quoted above.

To contend for property-holder suffrage in 1790 would not have been loony. But to do so today somehow would be. To contend for adult male suffrage in 1910 would not have been loony. But to do so today somehow would be. To try to put pornography, abortionists, and dispensers of condoms out of business as late as 1915 would not have been loony. But to so today is laughably quixotic.

Trouble is, the sand keeps shifting: And what was once common sense tempered with moderation becomes loony. And that is because the entire foundation is built upon liberalism: America herself is, with no adulteration, a liberal enterprise; which, after her success in WWII, she has franchised to the entire "civilized" world. (That is, in fact, how most liberals define "civilized.") And though "left" and "right" appear to do battle on this ground, the sand moves only one way. The "left" always (ultimately) wins; the "right" always (despite temporary, often illusory gains) ultimately loses.

Conservatives today (and probably not for the last 50, arguable 200, years) are not fighting the actual flow of the sand, i.e., for the restoration of hereditary monarchy and destruction of liberal empire, but instead for a particular preferred state of liberalism. Moldbug critiques Auster on this very point: His View from the Right could be justly be called View from the Left... ante-1960.

This response is kind of illustrative, no? This tactic of calling people who make arguments we don't like bigots is characteristic of the left or the right? And the warm reception Ilion's post received from Dr Beckwith means what, exactly? That calling people bigots on no evidence because they uttered a taboo word which only magically became a taboo word sometime after 2002 is a good thing?

There is nothing that I said which merited anything like this reaction.

Not that there is much point in defending yourself against claims of bigotry --- I mean defending yourself is further proof of your bigotry, right? But I can't resist. Is Irving Kristol an anti-semite? Cause he wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. He also wrote an article entitled "Neoconservatism The Neoconservative Persuasion: What it was, and what it is." for The Weekly Standard .

Denial of the existence of neoconservatism is bizarre. And the multi-culti petty totalitarian tactics of the denialists are vile.

There is no sneering anathaema in what I wrote. In fact, I don't see, nor did I intend, any substantive normative point at all in what I wrote.

My point was that I think that the question which you asked for feedback on is ill-defined because a definition of conservative is missing. The comment began with this point, out of aristocles mouth. The second and third paras makes this point explicitly and are the nut of the comment. The first and fourth paras (which seem to have attracted your ire) make the point that, in practice, the thing that people point to in the world and call conservative really looks a lot like parade following. NR and WWWtW are likely to be familiar examples around these parts, no?

That point was not intended as an insult and it need not have been read as one, although it obviously could be read as one. Furthermore, I didn't say that *you* would change any of your positions. The only thing I said about *you* is that your question in the OP is not so hot. It's a personal compliment to have your argument constructively challenged.

For example, I would take it as a personal compliment if you would tell me why my criticism is wrong.

My defense against the rest of what you say would be more of the same: you are reading very far past the denotative meaning of what I said, and this is leading you greatly to mischaracterize my claims.

We need to strive towards a new Conservatism that imitates the moral appeal and hipness of modern leftism. We can do this without selling out, because the public want to hear about leftist failure, and we can supply them with that.

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